TOWN OF WINDSOR
AGENDA REPORT

Tim Ricard, Economic Development Manager

Economic Development Strategic Plan: Year One Implementation Report and Year Two Priorities

Receive an informational report on implementation of the Economic Development Strategic Plan (EDSP) during its first year and provide feedback.

On May 7, 2025, the Town Council adopted Windsor’s current Economic Development Strategic Plan (EDSP), replacing the previous document approved fifteen years ago. The EDSP is the Town’s roadmap for economic growth over the next five to ten years, built from a year of community outreach and conversation, data analysis, and benchmarking. This report gives the Council its first annual accounting of implementation and proposes priorities for Year Two.

That work started with an economic and demographic profile measuring Windsor against other Sonoma County cities, Bay Area counties, and the state on taxable sales, employment, commute patterns, household income, housing, and municipal revenues. The findings framed the discussion at two community forums, task force sessions, and one-on-one stakeholder interviews, and a bilingual community survey rounded out the outreach. A SWOT analysis brought the data and the community record together into the vision and goals the Council adopted.

The engagement told a consistent story. Residents value Windsor’s family-oriented character, its Town Green, its safety, and its independent businesses. They worry about retail spending leaking to neighboring cities, the shortage of lodging, gaps in pedestrian and bicycle connections, and the lack of affordable housing for the local workforce. Survey respondents ranked investment in infrastructure and amenities, along with strengthening the Town’s tax base, as their top economic priorities.
From that foundation the EDSP sets a vision: “Windsor envisions a resilient, sustainable economy that upholds its identity as a vibrant, family-oriented and innovative town,” and organizes roughly 76 actions under five goals:

• Goal 1, Supporting Business & Economic Vitality: a thriving business environment that fosters innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience.

• Goal 2, Developing Effective Tools & Policies: resources, policies, and support that drive responsible development and community-centered growth.

• Goal 3, Focusing on Key Sectors: targeting business sectors that align with Windsor’s character and support sustainable growth.

• Goal 4, Promoting Windsor’s Identity: strengthening Windsor’s image as a destination for business, tourism, and talent.

• Goal 5, Enhancing Quality of Life: a community with access to amenities, health resources, and cultural experiences.

Windsor’s Economic Development Division sits within the Town Manager’s Office and consists of one position, the Economic Development Manager. A division of one cannot run every program itself. It succeeds by convening and leveraging others, and it delivers many of the programs in this report in partnership with organizations such as the Windsor Chamber of Commerce, the Sonoma County Economic Development Collaborative, Sonoma County Tourism, the Sonoma Small Business Development Center, and the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz). Just as important are the working relationships inside Town Hall. Nearly every project in this report moved forward because Planning, Public Works, Fire, Building, or Police supported it.

How Economic Development Works
Economic development is the work of creating the conditions in which businesses choose to start, stay, grow, and invest in Windsor. The private sector makes the investments. The Town’s role is the daily practice behind them, business retention and expansion, attraction and marketing, small business support, opportunity site development, and access to capital, all of it built on relationships. Results arrive on a long clock. A hotel, a shopping center anchor, or a manufacturing expansion routinely takes three to seven years from first conversation to opening day, so the fair measure of a plan’s first year is the pipeline being built alongside the ribbon cuttings.

A significant share of the work also cannot be publicized while it is happening. Companies treat site searches as competitively sensitive, and state programs such as GO-Biz’s site selection service operate confidentially. This report therefore describes attraction activity in aggregate, with confidential specifics available to the Council through appropriate channels.
Economic Context: The Region and Windsor

The North Bay economy has spent the last two years working through a soft landing. Sonoma County unemployment stood at 3.7 percent in May 2026, tightening from 4.6 percent in January. Countywide sales tax was roughly flat in calendar 2025 while e-commerce receipts grew about 9 percent, and consumer dollars keep migrating online.

Visitor demand and hotel economics are moving in different directions. Countywide travel spending reached $2.4 billion in 2025, up 1.3 percent and essentially flat after inflation, but transient occupancy tax collections of $64.5 million remain below the 2022 peak of $67 million, and hotel revenue per room has been slipping, with luxury properties outperforming the midscale and independent hotels that make up Windsor’s inventory. Steady visitor traffic supports the restaurants, tasting rooms, and shops Windsor already has. It does not make new hotel construction financeable, which is the backdrop for the two stalled hotel projects and the Holiday Inn bankruptcy described below.

SMART Economic Impact
SMART service began May 31, 2025, and the system recorded its highest ridership month ever in May 2026 with 148,000 riders, up 25 percent year over year. Windsor is one of the system’s strongest stations, with 275 to 395 average weekday boardings. The fiscal picture moves more slowly. Sales tax receipts from the roughly 100 outlets in the Old Downtown area around the depot were $63,295 in the first quarter of 2026 against $60,729 a year earlier, up 4.2 percent but still below their 2024 levels. Rail foot traffic converts into taxable sales slowly and indirectly, which is why the Station Area Plan economics and the downtown work under Goals 4 and 5 matter more than ridership counts alone.

High Median Income. Windsor has the highest median household income in Sonoma County ($128,115, against $99,266 countywide), the county’s highest homeownership rate (75.7 percent), and its safest small-town profile. Those strengths coexist with three structural challenges that the EDSP was written to address.

• Windsor exports its workforce. More than 85 percent of Windsor’s roughly 12,600 employed residents commute to jobs outside town, about a quarter of them to Santa Rosa, while roughly 8,100 jobs are located within Windsor. Every economic development win that adds quality local employment shortens commutes and keeps daytime spending in town.

• Windsor exports its spending. Taxable retail sales in Windsor averaged $12,092 per resident, about 29 percent below the countywide figure ($17,043) and 25 percent below the California figure ($16,045). An estimated 24 percent of residents’ retail spending power goes to other jurisdictions, nearly all of which already collect a local sales tax. Windsor is the only incorporated city in Sonoma County without one, and at 9.25 percent it has the county’s lowest combined rate. HdL’s per capita gap analysis puts the largest shortfalls in family apparel, specialty stores, home furnishings, auto repair, sporting goods, department stores, electronics, and fine dining.

• Sales tax performance. Sales tax is the General Fund’s second largest revenue source at about 22 percent, behind property tax at 46 percent. It fell three years running, 4.8 percent in 2023, 3.8 percent in 2024, and 3.6 percent in 2025, with fuel, autos, and contractors leading the slide.

The first quarter of 2026 finally broke the three-year slide, with receipts up 5.2 percent, though much of that gain came from online deliveries rather than local storefronts.

The revenue base is also concentrated. Home Depot and Walmart together generate about a quarter of Windsor’s point of sale receipts, the top 25 accounts generate roughly 70 percent, and the Shiloh area alone produces more than a third. A single account can move the totals. The largest decline in 2025 came from one service station that was under construction, which by itself accounted for about a third of the drop in the town’s total receipts that year. Diversifying that base is the fiscal logic behind every goal of the EDSP.

Development
The development picture is mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, Shiloh Terrace (134 affordable apartments) welcomed residents, Cora Creek Apartments (106 affordable units) broke ground, Elowen Oaks (60 units plus approximately 35,700 square feet of commercial space, including an Avid Coffee) is under construction, and Dollar Tree opened during 2025, generating new sales tax revenues.

On the difficult side, the four-story, 135-room McClelland Drive hotel on the Town Green, the single largest potential generator of new transient occupancy tax, once projected at $600,000 to $1 million per year, remains halted indefinitely after its financing collapsed under higher interest rates. The developer of the proposed Arata Lane hotel site has placed the property on the market. In addition, the lodging Windsor does have is under strain. On June 3, 2026, Windsor Hospitality Group LLC, the family ownership entity behind the 100-room Holiday Inn Windsor Wine Country, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California after falling behind on obligations. The hotel remains open and is now in the process of being sold through the bankruptcy court.

Industrial development is waiting for the same regional market turnaround. Brennan Acquisitions Group’s Shiloh Business Park, three buildings totaling approximately 480,000 square feet of light industrial and manufacturing space on a 45-acre site at Shiloh Road and Pruitt Avenue, is approved and working through final map recording and building permits, but has not broken ground. It is the largest block of new employment space in the Town’s pipeline, and helping the owner bring it to construction is one of the most direct ways to address the workforce export problem described above.

Year One Implementation, by Goal

Goal 1: Supporting Business & Economic Vitality

The heart of Goal 1 is business retention and expansion, knowing Windsor’s businesses well enough to help before a problem becomes a closure. The Town’s business license rolls list 1,047 active business licenses as of August 2026, and the mix says a lot about how Windsor actually works. Some 149 licenses, about one in seven, are home occupation permits, entrepreneurs running businesses out of Windsor homes. The rolls also include 91 retail licenses, 83 food and accommodation businesses, more than 100 contractors, and 30 licensed vacation rentals.

Conducted ongoing BRE visits and check-ins with businesses across every commercial district, from anchor retailers and wineries to single-proprietor storefronts.

Launched the Town’s first Business Confidence Survey (February 2026), implementing EDSP action 1.2e, to give the Council an annual, data-based read on business conditions.

Brought the Sonoma SBDC Capital Summit to Windsor (May 12, 2025) with the Chamber, connecting more than 30 existing and prospective business owners directly with the U.S. Small Business Administration and seven banks and community lenders.

Co-hosted a Business Resource Fair with the state Employment Development Department and the Chamber (September 10, 2025).

Delivered workshops tailored specifically to business owners, which included an AI for Business workshop with the Chamber in February 2026, one in English and one in Spanish, a Green Business workshop (October 2025), and a presentation to more than 75 attendees, mostly Latino entrepreneurs, at the Chamber’s Latinos Exitosos workshop (February 2024).

Assisted with business transitions so storefronts do not sit dark. When Café Noto closed, staff worked with the property owner and operators so Gray Squirrel Manor could open in the space within weeks. The former Flagship Taproom reopened as Rough Draft Taproom. Staff conducted exit interviews with closing businesses to capture the reasons and respond. The former Windsor Brewery space at 9000 Windsor Road reopened in August 2026 as Spur Saloon, a country western saloon and live music venue from the local team behind Grata Italian Eatery.

Sustained the partnership infrastructure the plan calls for, which includes regular partner meetings with the Sonoma County Economic Development Collaborative, roughly 30 Chamber engagements including monthly luncheons, support for Leadership Windsor, and reintroduction of the Quail Tracks business newsletter.

Goal 2: Developing Effective Tools & Policies

The largest single body of Goal 2 work this year was the November 2026 revenue measure. On July 15, 2026, the Council voted to place a 1 percent transactions-and-use tax on the November 3, 2026 ballot, projected to generate approximately $5.7 million per year in locally controlled revenue against a projected $4 to $5 million structural deficit. Getting a measure of this significance to the ballot took nearly eighteen months of staff work, with Economic Development playing a key role.

• Analysis. Staff built the fiscal case piece by piece, including the per-capita sales tax comparisons showing Windsor as the only city in Sonoma County without a local sales tax (321 of 482 California cities have one), peer-city budget benchmarking across all eight neighboring jurisdictions, a term analysis of 95 comparable 2024 measures, a household cost model estimating the measure at roughly $6 per resident per month, and the business license tax alternative presented to Council in March 2026.
• Community engagement. Staff coordinated and delivered more than 30 presentations and briefings to service clubs including Rotary, HOAs and mobile home communities, school and business audiences, the Chamber, employee associations including the Teamsters, Firefighters, and Deputy Sheriffs, the Downtown association, Windsor High School leadership classes, and the Planning Commission, and developed informational materials, an FAQ, and a staff toolkit.

Initiated an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District (EIFD) feasibility effort (EDSP action 2.2a), meeting with district-formation specialists in July 2026 on a first use case, financing the planned Highway 101 northbound on-ramp at Arata Lane, which would unlock the Town’s northern commercial sites. Sonoma County adopted an EIFD policy in 2024, and staff are tracking the Board of Supervisors’ August 2026 policy discussion. A district formed by 2027 would capture tax increment from development not yet built. The continued exploration and potential implementation of this program will be a key Year Two goal.

Partnered on the Station Area Plan update. The Community Development Department secured a $1.2 million Metropolitan Transportation Commission grant for the station area (February 2025), with $600,000 to update the Station Area Plan and $600,000 for implementation. Economic Development staff serve on the project team for the update, which kicked off in March 2026, and are shaping the plan’s economic development components so station-area sites are positioned to attract private investment.

Evaluated a downtown entertainment zone. In response to a downtown business request, staff researched the new state law (SB 969) allowing cities to create zones where patrons of licensed businesses may carry beverages within a defined boundary, compiled Windsor’s own 2020 to 2022 open-container pilot history and peer-city approaches including Santa Rosa’s planned pilot, and prepared an options memo for Town Manager review. Staff will use this information to develop policy options for Council in the coming months.

Supplied the economic analysis behind Council policy decisions. When Council land use decisions needed economic analysis, staff provided it, including the market data and revenue estimates behind the May 2026 personal storage facility ordinance, and the retail and sales tax analysis informing the gas station ordinance amendments considered in summer 2026.

Rebuilt downtown parking management for the SMART era. When trains began stopping downtown in mid-2025, free all-day parking near the station stopped working. Riders filled the Emily Rose intermodal lot even after SMART opened its own 125-space lot, crowding out downtown customers. Staff developed the policy response with the Police Department, co-authoring the September 2025 Council item that established 3-hour and 24-hour limits across the lot’s 97 public spaces and updated the Town’s parking fine schedule, and coordinated with Sonoma County Transit, which shares the lot under the intermodal cooperative agreement, to land on time limits both agencies could support.

Implementation followed through the winter, with signage designed, fabricated, and installed, and enforcement phased in with the Police Department after outreach to downtown businesses. The work builds on the timed-parking program staff brought to Council in 2023, which set 123 timed spaces on McClelland, DuVander, and Windsor Road against 259 free all-day spaces, guided by the 2020 Downtown Parking Study.

Delivered the EDSP’s Business Concierge service. The plan calls for a concierge approach to development, one point of contact who convenes Town departments around a project instead of leaving the applicant to navigate them alone. In one case, staff coordinated Planning, Public Works, Fire, and Building reviews to resolve water and wastewater questions for a confidential beverage manufacturing prospect evaluating an 80,000 to 100,000 square foot production facility. In another, Bruce Shimizu approached the Town while he was still deciding whether a sake brewery in Windsor was feasible. Staff discussed his business plan, identified suitable zoning and available sites, and connected him with outside resources. Shimizu Sake Company took out its Windsor business license in February, received its state brewing license in June, and opens its tasting bar on Business Park Court this September.

Goal 3: Focusing on Key Sectors

Goal 3 is where confidentiality most limits public detail, so this section reports the pipeline in aggregate.

An active attraction pipeline. Over the past year Economic Development has fielded and worked more than a dozen active site inquiries, including national general-merchandise, warehouse-club, grocery, and quick-service concepts, an auto dealership for a vacant former dealership site, a large indoor youth-sports complex, beverage and food production, and hospitality operators. In May 2026 staff submitted Windsor sites for two confidential statewide manufacturing searches through GO-Biz’s site-selection program.

Opportunity-site groundwork. Staff maintained direct, ongoing engagement with the owners and brokers of Windsor’s most consequential underused properties, preparing land-use parameters, connecting owners with qualified developers, and keeping Windsor sites in front of the brokerage community.

One example shows what this work looks like in practice, and why it takes patience. The Smith family has owned nearly 20 acres of the Town’s northern gateway on Old Redwood Highway for decades. The parcels sit inside the urban growth boundary, carry a Gateway Commercial designation, front Highway 101, and have held a certified environmental impact report since 2007 assuming roughly 254,000 square feet of commercial development. For almost two years staff invested in the relationship, which included an introductory letter, follow-up conversations, steady and honest answers about zoning and the approval process, and the Council’s consistent interest in revenue-generating development at the site. In July 2026 that patience paid off. Marjorie Smith met with staff and shared that the family is ready to bring the property to market. Staff prepared a professional property summary package and assembled the entitlement record. The property should be coming on the market later this summer. That is the nature of the work.

The same work does not always pay off. One recent example is the attraction of an art gallery owner for downtown. Staff developed a tailored recruitment package, tours of available spaces, and introductions to property owners, but the owner ultimately decided against relocating to Windsor and chose Sonoma. Most recruitment conversations end this way. The response is to keep the pipeline full so that the ones that do land, like the openings and prospects described above, keep coming.
Hospitality and the beverage sector. Staff co-hosted a Sonoma County Tourism “Community Insights” tour bringing 20 hotel concierge and guest-services professionals to six downtown Windsor businesses to build hotel-to-Windsor referral networks, continued Beverage District promotion, and worked with the McClelland and Arata Lane hotel developers on paths forward for both stalled projects. The beverage sector is also adding storefronts. Trecini Winery, a Russian River Valley label that changed hands to a Sonoma County grape grower in 2025, opened a tasting room at 9071 Windsor Road in downtown Windsor this summer.

Goal 4: Promoting Windsor’s Identity

Levi's Gran Fondo. The flagship promotional event for economic developments is the Levi’s GranFondo partnership with Bike Monkey. The event puts Windsor’s name in front of a global cycling audience, fills its restaurants and lodging in a single spring weekend, and showcases Windsor businesses directly.

The 2025 event also produced the first live broadcast of a professional road race in North America in more than five years, with 49,500 livestream views across 77 countries in five days, 1.2 million total social media views in the surrounding month, and national coverage in the cycling press centered on the race’s $156,000 prize purse. That is media reach no advertising budget of Windsor’s size could buy.

The 2026 event generated $1.89 million in economic output and supported the equivalent of 11 local jobs, up from $1.74 million in 2025. Ninety-seven percent of surveyed riders came from outside Windsor, a quarter of them from out of state or abroad, and 30 percent stayed overnight in Windsor lodging. Attachment 2 has the full analysis.

This year, for the first time, the event’s rider meals came exclusively from Windsor restaurants rather than outside vendors. Lupe’s Diner, Himalayan, KC’s American Kitchen, and Kin each prepared a set post-ride menu, and several reported it was their busiest day of the year.

Shop-local campaigns that outperform. The Town runs a seasonal social media campaign each year to keep holiday spending in Windsor. The 2025 campaign turned $7,319 in ad spend into 962,312 impressions and 9,158 click-throughs at $0.80 per click, roughly half the industry-average cost and a click-through rate more than double the benchmark. These campaigns do double duty, reminding residents to shop locally and putting Windsor businesses in front of the visitors the Town Green already draws.

In June 2026, Economic Development and the Chamber launched the year-round successor, “Keep It Local Windsor,” developed over the spring with the Sonoma County Economic Development Collaborative. It is a working example of the partnership model this report describes, built on a message that costs little and fits Windsor’s fiscal moment: your dollar stays here, and so does the difference it makes.

Participation has been strong. Over 60 businesses registered in the first five weeks, and the stickers are now showing up in storefront windows across town. Campaign posts drew more than 47,400 views in their first two weeks, and the two spotlighting individual businesses accounted for about 30,000 of them. That is the bet behind the second phase, built around short form video profiles of participating businesses. The branding has also moved onto downtown wayfinding signs and onto the bumpers of Town vehicles, which carry the message around Windsor at no cost.

Refreshed the Discover Windsor web presence. Staff rebuilt the Discover Windsor web presence this year with a new downtown specific page, updated development sections tracking current projects and proposals alongside key data, and a new hero video introducing the town.

Direct accessibility. “Time with Tim” open-office sessions give any business owner or resident a standing monthly channel to economic development staff.

Goal 5: Enhancing Quality of Life

Shiloh Center revitalization. The aging Shiloh shopping center generates more sales tax than any other district in Windsor, and it has become the Town’s most persistent safety and maintenance concern. Staff organized a business safety meeting with the Chief of Police in April 2025 that included evaluating an on-site police substation, wrote to every ownership entity in the center in March 2025 to open direct engagement on maintenance, security, and communication, and secured commitments from Walmart for parking lot restriping, landscaping replacement, power washing, and graffiti abatement alongside its store remodel. That engagement also produced the center’s most visible improvement in years. The water tower and monument signs have been cleaned, repainted, and fitted with new tenant panels, funded by Home Depot at no cost to the Town. This work is slow by nature. The center is divided among roughly ten separate ownerships, and improvement depends on engagement built one owner at a time. The signs are what that groundwork looks like when it pays off, and continuing this work at Shiloh is a key priority for Year Two.

Community infrastructure. Staff sustained the CRV recycling center partnership with United Cerebral Palsy of the North Bay through its CalRecycle approval, and continued downtown support through the Town Green Village Association, including the holiday lights reimbursement agreement.

Year Two Priorities (FY 2026-27)

Staff propose organizing Year Two around eight priorities. Each traces to adopted EDSP actions, and together they are sized to what a division of one, working through partners, can credibly deliver.

• Bring the northern gateway to market. Windsor’s northern gateway holds the largest block of development ready commercial land in town, fronting Highway 101 with entitlements and environmental review already in place. As those parcels come available, staff will support owner marketing efforts, keep the entitlement record in front of qualified developers and brokers, and work with prospective buyers on uses that generate point of sale revenue. A large format retailer at this location would broaden the Town’s sales tax base more than any other opportunity currently in the pipeline. (Goals 2, 3)

• Execute the retail attraction strategy. Continue to move from analysis to recruitment by using customer analytics to actively market Windsor to operators in leakage categories, and continue advancing the existing confidential prospect pipeline, including the GO-Biz submissions. (Goal 3)

• Institutionalize BRE. The visitation program, exit interviews, and welcome work described under Goal 1 are already running. Year Two makes them durable rather than dependent on any one person. That means the second annual Business Confidence Survey, a simple CRM to track engagements, a formalized business welcome program (EDSP 1.2c), and quarterly industry cluster roundtables. (Goal 1)

• Put Windsor's home-based businesses on a path to grow. One in seven Windsor business licenses, 149 of them, is a home occupation permit, covering food producers, makers, consultants, and service firms working out of kitchens, garages, and spare rooms. The Town's home occupation rules determine how far any of them can go before they have to leave Windsor to expand, and there is no shared commercial kitchen or maker space here for the ones that outgrow home. Year Two work is to review and modernize those regulations with Community Development (EDSP 1.5a) and to test the feasibility of shared production space, on its own or with a private or nonprofit partner (EDSP 1.5b and 1.6b). 

• Rebuild the lodging pipeline. Windsor’s lodging shortage is its single most-cited economic weakness, and its two entitled hotel projects are stalled. Work with the McClelland and Arata Lane property interests, hospitality developers, and Sonoma County Tourism on a realistic path to at least one active hotel project, and secure a multi-year GranFondo agreement so the Town’s highest-visibility tourism asset is not renegotiated annually. (Goals 3, 4)

• Advance the Shiloh corridor. Continue property-owner engagement at the Shiloh Center, including the police substation evaluation, and press the corridor’s large underused sites, which sit in the Town’s highest-revenue district, toward development-ready status. (Goals 2, 3, 5)
• Finish the Station Area Plan. Complete the Station Area Plan process, adopt an implementation program for the $600,000 implementation grant, and package station area opportunity sites for the development community while SMART ridership momentum is working in Windsor’s favor. (Goals 2, 3)

• Move the EIFD from concept to formation. Complete a feasibility analysis for an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District anchored on the Highway 101 northbound on-ramp at Arata Lane, coordinate with Sonoma County staff, and present findings to Council on the feasibility of forming a district in 2027. (Goals 2, 3)

This is an informational report. Receiving it has no direct fiscal impact. Year One activities were delivered within the Economic Development Division’s adopted budget. Year Two priorities are anticipated to be accomplished within the adopted FY 2026-27 budget. Any actions requiring new appropriations will return to Council individually.

Environmental review is not required. An informational report is not a “project” subject to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Any future actions arising from the priorities described above would be analyzed for CEQA compliance before a decision.